Sunday, 1 May 2016

Hofmannsthal poems

Dredged up from an old computer disk – my clumsy efforts from the 1990s to English three poems by Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) written a century earlier. If memory serves, the occasion was the possible publication by Carcanet Press of a volume of Hofmannsthal’s verse. Michael Schmidt, Carcanet’s editorial director, was unimpressed by my locutions, rightly suspecting that Michael Hamburger would have done it so much better. The poems are ‘Manche freilich…’ (1895), ‘Die Beiden’ (1896) and ‘Über Vergänglichkeit’ (1894).

SOME THERE ARE...

Some there are who must perish below,
Where the weighty oars of the galleys scour,
Others dwell aloft by the helm,
Know the flight of birds and the resort of stars.

Some will always lie with heavy limbs
Among the roots of tangled life,
While for others places are set
With the sibyls, the empresses,
And there they will sit as if at home,
Light heads on lighter shoulders.

But a shadow falls from those lives
Across into the other lives,
And the light are bound to the heavy
As the air and earth are bound:

Weariness of quite-forgotten peoples
I cannot dismiss from my eyelids,
Nor ward off from my terrified soul
The silent fall of distant stars.

Many fates are woven next to mine,
Existence merges all of them in play,
And my part is more than this life’s
Slender flame or narrow lyre.

THE COUPLE

She held the goblet in one hand
-- Her mouth and chin were like its rim --
So light and certain was her gait
No droplet from the glass escaped.

So light and firm was his command:
He rode upon a sprightly horse,
And with a single careless gesture
Brought it, quivering, to a stop.

And yet, when it was time for him
To take the dainty vessel from her,
Its weight defied their joint attempt:

For both of them were trembling so
That neither found the other’s hand
And ruby wine spilt on the ground.

ON TRANSITORINESS

Upon my cheeks I feel still their breath:
How can it be that these so recent days
Are gone, gone for ever, as if in death?

This is a thing that no one fully knows,
Beyond lament, too dreadful to erase:
That everything glides by us, ebbs and flows.

And that my own self, quite unbound, appeared
Gliding out from a little child and rose
Towards me silent, like a dog, and weird.

A hundred years ago I too was there
And my forebears, asleep in shrouds, are near
To me, akin as I to my own hair,